The ICLP Doctoral Consortium (DC) in Lexington, Kentucky, USA, at the occasion of ICLP 2011, was the seventh edition of this forum. The DC aims to provide students with an opportunity to present and discuss their research directions and to obtain feedback from peers as well as from world-renown experts in the field.
The DC was held on the first day of ICLP, July 6th 2011, thus allowing the students to get known to each other at a rather early stage of the conference and thus they had time to exchange ideas on the other days and jointly followed the remainder of the conference.
The programme of the DC 2011 consisted of 9 student contributions and two invited talks. The research topics presented ranged from ASP to parallel systems and from reasoning to applications. Students had 15 minutes to present the context of their work, the current state of their thesis, and the open issues they still have to solve. 5 minutes were reserved for discussions. In addition each student received individual feedback from the organizers.
Moreover, there was an active participation of regular ICLP attendants that made the interaction between experts and students even more beneficial. Details about the programs as well as the students’ research summaries are available under
http://cmt.math.unipr.it/DC2011.
The highlights of this year’s consortium were two invited talks: Agostino Dovier, Univ. of Udine, presented his recent research on protein folding and the challenges such problems from bio-informatics provide for logic programming methods.
This talk also pointed out the importance of having real-world applications for logic programming in order to keep the field active and successful; an issue that was also raised in the ALP business meeting later that day. The second speaker, Georg Gottlob, Univ. of Oxford, emphasized in his talk “Project Proposals: Why and how to write them” the importance of applying for research projects.
He introduced the students to the general process of project handling by funding agencies and which issues are important in order to convince potential reviewers. He gave valuable hints about guidelines for writing proposals in order to have good chances for acceptance. This talk was an excellent contribution not only for the applicants of the DC but also for several other ICLP participants.
We would like to take the opportunity here to thank the applicants, the invited speakers, and all others participants. Their contributions were the basis for the success of this year’s consortium! As well, the support from ALP and from the local organizers of ICLP was of great help.
The next doctoral consortium will be run at ICLP 2012 in Budapest, Hungary.